is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in
the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads,
of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here
carried out to its utmost extreme.

Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is
here openly declared. Just as in Stirner's recent book, people regard
each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end
of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that
the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while
to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true
of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on
one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare,
every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering
under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed
that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they
manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole
crazy fabric still hangs together.

Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence
and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried
on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon
the poor. For him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the
whirlpool, he must struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy
as to find work, _i.e_., if the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich
itself by means of him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep
body and soul together; if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not
afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care